It’s starting to feel a bit like home for Dr. Dolores Straker.The new dean assumed her official duties at Raymond Walters College on September 1, 2003 after relocating from the City University of New York where she served as University Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.
The rolling hills that Ohioians all too often take for granted, those low gentle slopes that Dr. Straker laughingly refers to as mountainous, are becoming familiar sights now to her in her rear window as she makes the daily commute to RWC.
But, it was more than the beauty that only fall in Ohio can bring that lured her to our campus.
“The job was very intriguing,” Dr. Straker said. “I thought that RWC – what it stood for, its missions, its teaching mission, its community service mission, its shared governance – all matched very well with principles that I was interested in, and I thought it would be a good environment to work in.”
And it is an environment also in which she seeks to build upon, one in which students hold the key to their future, Dr. Straker firmly believing in the philosophy that “empowerment is key.”
“I think one of the things is important is that everyone knows that they are the participants in their own lives,” she said.
And Dean Straker sees the role of the faculty especially as one in which to empower students, emphasizing that the strongest part of empowerment is in the imparting of knowledge and information.
“It’s important that students know that they a voice in or a role in tailoring a course that they’re in to suit the needs that they have,” she stressed.
Dean Straker recounted a story of empowerment in action. In her first role with the City University, she worked with the Search for Education Elevation and Knowledge (SEAK) program, a program designed to get student’s basic reading and writing levels up to par.
According to Dean Straker, these students struggled with faculty members who belittled them because they had issues with reading and writing due to high schools that did not prepare them for higher education, but once empowered, she saw them “blossom” and do “truly phenomenal things.”
“That was where my passion for learning came from,” she said excitedly. Once given the proper tools, Dean Straker saw these students “take off like a rocket.”
Although she seems to have found her calling in the world of education, ironically, Dean Straker never initially had aspirations of becoming an educator.
“I never thought I’d become a teacher,” she said laughingly. When I was 14, I thought the coolest job in the world would be to become an interpreter at the U.N.”
But education nonetheless always played a large role in Dean Straker’s family. Her father’s family especially was “wedded to education” and she always knew, “Whatever you were going to do in life education was going to be a big part of it and you weren’t going to stop.”
Four special women in her life have molded her into the strong women she has become today.
“Both of my grandmothers, in their own way, they imparted my whole philosophy of empowering other people,” Dean Straker said nostalgically.
Her grandmothers shaped her direction in life as a young child. Her father’s mother migrated from Barbados in her twenties, her mother’s mother from Georgia in her teens. They were two very strong women for their time and this trait seems to have been passed along the gene pool.
Dean Straker’s eyes light up especially and a devilish grin sneaks its way on her face when she speaks of her aunt.
“My aunt, she was a lawyer. She went to Hunter College when African-Americans didn’t go to college, when women didn’t go to college. She did all of the things that to a young girl growing up were new, different, challenging of the status quo and exciting.”
Equally influential in her life has been her mother. When asked to describe this paragon of virtue, Dean Straker expounded in a lexicon of words that one knows could not possibly ever hope to serve her mother justice… words such as resilient, fighter, strong, adversity of life.
Looking back over the years, Dean Straker has garnered these words of wisdom from the women in her life, “Strength, ambition. Your horizons are not limited. They’re only limited by your imagination and your energy. You should be and can be free to pursue a broad range of experiences in life.”
And that is, quite simply, what she hopes to impart for the student at RWC.
“I hope that they [students] have an experience inside and outside the classroom that tells them or that tells the world that they are really in charge of their fate, I hope to give them the foundation that gives them the strength and security to handle whatever life brings to them,” Dean Straker said.
Hill or mountain, Dr. Straker doesn’t seem daunted by journey to the top.
“I’m looking to to make us, to make RWC, a nationally known school for what we do best, and that is to nurture our students so that they are successful in their lives.”